Wednesday, January 27, 2016

This opinion piece on the English language daily the Saudi Gazette of January 27, 2016 was written by Tareq A. Al-Maeena. A link to his article is here, and the text is pasted in below.

Many Saudi visitors to the UAE on their return to the
Kingdom are heard to mutter: Why them and why not us? The country has
in recent times become a draw for Saudis wanting to escape abroad for a
short holiday. Tourists have been flocking to the UAE by the hundreds of
thousands. And they don’t visit only once. Families make up the bulk
of visitors, but there are also a sizable number of single males and
females who venture to the Emirates on their own.
What is it that attracts these visitors from a nearby country? It is
certainly not the weather as there are no significant climatic
differences between the two countries. Nor is there a dramatic change
in topography that might induce some to visit. Shops and restaurants
are not much different in both countries. Yet in the balance of travel,
visitors from the Saudi side most likely outnumber their UAE
counterparts by 10 to 1.
There are significant reasons why Saudis would make the trip from the
Kingdom to the UAE. The first is that they find the UAE more similar
than different from their own culture. And besides a host of other
reasons such as world class entertainment, there is the compelling draw
of a country that places no unjustified restrictions on its women.
A resident of Jeddah explained her own reasons why she chooses the
UAE during the holidays rather than spending her time in the Kingdom.
She says: “It’s all about personal freedom. The UAE is an Islamic
country which follows a similar code to Saudi Arabia, yet allows women
choices that we find denied here. And the number one irritant and
nuisance to all women here is not allowing them to drive their own
cars. Perhaps we can attempt to get a discussion going in the Shoura
Council pertaining to this matter by using a different logic; perhaps
the argument of conservation?”
Her novel argument went as follows: “The fastest and least expensive
way to conserve water and other resources in Saudi Arabia and save some
of our outbound tourist dollars would be to allow women to drive! Where
is the connection? Allow me to give an explanation in a very rough
estimate of figures: If women were given the right to drive,
approximately one million drivers could eventually be sent back to their
home countries. Each one of these men uses about 300 liters of water a
day, (about 1/3 cubic meter).
That’s 300,000,000 liters per day for a million drivers. That’s
90,000,000,000 liters per year, with allowances made for their vacation
time. That’ 90,000,000 cubic meters per year of water consumed by
drivers alone.
“The desalination plant in Saudi Arabia produces 1,000,000 cubic
meters of water per day. That’s 365,000,000 cubic meters a year. If we
had a million less drivers we would only need 275,000,000 cubic meters.
The Shuaiba desalination plant would thus have 25 percent surplus water
for people to use if women could drive their own cars. Double check the
math.
“The same approximate figures would hold true for electricity consumption.
Even if drivers were to be slowly phased out, this would amount to an
enormous saving for the country in terms of water, energy, and of course
finances as well. The employment of drivers is becoming an increasing
financial burden. Some women’s salaries are spent solely on a driver.
Should women then not receive government subsidies for each
household, as compensation for the expenses of having to pay recruiting
agencies, visas, air fare, medical check-ups, driver’s licenses, traffic
tickets, extra living quarters, furniture, insurance, meals, medical
bills and medication, and of course water and electricity, etc., in
addition to drivers’ salaries?
“What a huge financial burden for a country with a shrinking middle
class, and with minimum wages not much higher than that paid to a driver
brought in from a developing country, many of whom have never driven a
car before coming to work in Saudi Arabia. That brings up the safety
issue as well: safety on the road, safety allowing one’s children day in
and day out in the presence of a stranger.
“Which leads me to my next point. The burden of women being banned
from driving is also of a psychological and social nature. How has a
conservative society such as Saudi Arabia ever allowed itself to bring
total strangers into their homes, not knowing the slightest thing about
their past, or their moral conduct? It’s a mystery. The whole issue of
the ban on women driving is a mystery and a paradox. And you wonder why
we all escape to the UAE? Perhaps it’s because they have got it
right!”
And thus the woman concludes her argument with new reasoning. The
fact that she has chosen an original slant to a social issue indicates
that this issue will simply not go away. Nor will those marginalized by
these restrictions remain silent. The issue should not be blanketed by
the traditions and beliefs of some. One must not be dismissive of her
arguments but look at the overall impact through the eyes of this woman.– The author can be reached at talmaeena@aol.com. Follow him on Twitter @talmaeena

Friday, January 22, 2016

Article from University of Oregon (USA) about Aisha Almana, one of the original women drivers in 1991 in Riyadh. A link to the story is here, and it's pasted in below. The article is by Melody Ward Leslie.

At
a time when most Saudi women received little or no formal education,
one future Duck set out on a quest that eventually led to a PhD. Then
she returned home to become her country’s leading activist for justice,
equality, and respect for women.

By Melody Ward Leslie, BA '79

Aisha Almana

Aisha
Almana, BS ’70, thought she was at the airport to see her father off.
Instead, he led her to the plane and explained that he was bringing her
to Egypt because their own country, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, had no
schools for girls.

She was eight years old. Bursting into tears, she asked, “Where is my mother?”
Sheikh Mohammed Abdulla Almana knelt to be eye-to-eye with his
daughter. “I don’t want you to be like your mother or your grandmother,”
he told her. “That’s why I am taking you to be educated. I want you to
come back and help the women of your country.”
With these words, he launched Almana toward a place in history as the mother of Saudi feminism.
Four years later, armed with a sixth-grade certificate of completion,
she returned home to Khobar just as Saudi Arabia was opening its first
schools for girls. All the teachers were wives of workers from non-Arab
countries because most Saudi women were illiterate. Sheikh Almana wanted
to set a precedent, so he installed his now-13-year-old daughter as the
region’s first female school principal and gave her behind-the-scenes
daily advice on how to run the school.
“All of the students were in the first grade, even though many were
my age or older,” she says, noting that she worked as principal for one
school year and then went to Lebanon to continue her education.
She has since achieved a series of firsts in a wealthy country that
still denies women basic rights. To the outside world, she’s best known
as a leader of the historic 1990 protest against Saudi Arabia’s ban on
women driving. The protest was Almana’s idea, and it grew out of her
experiences as an undergraduate sociology major at the UO.
“The University of Oregon gave me the opportunity to recognize that I
am a human being equal to anyone else,” she says. “I am a free soul,
and I am my own driver.”
Going to college in the United States was also Almana’s idea. When
her father refused to pay for it—but didn’t forbid her from going—she
made her own way by winning a scholarship. She arrived in Eugene in
September 1968 and found a campus bubbling with antiwar protests and
demonstrations for women’s rights.
For a young woman from a kingdom where freedom of speech was unheard
of, the notion of civil disobedience as a tool for social change
represented an entirely new way of thinking.
“It was an eye-opener, this idea that you have the right to express
yourself and you can differ with others, but it doesn’t mean you are
enemies,” she says."I am a human being equal to anyone else. I am a free soul, and I am my own driver."
However, she credits her awakening as an activist to a demonstration
of a different sort. On her first day of classes, a professor greeted
students by placing a jar of pebbles on a table and pronouncing it full.
Then, he closed the door and started taking off his clothes.
“I was shocked,” she says, her eyes still widening at the thought of it 45 years later.
She hardly had time to absorb that it was a trick (he was wearing
another layer of clothing) when the professor dumped sand into the jar.
Was it full now? he asked. Almana thought so, but next he poured in
water, which settled into crannies hiding between the rocks and grains
of sand.
“This affected me tremendously,” she says. “He showed how what you see is not the reality, and things can change.”Things can change.
In that spirit, Almana and 46 other women summoned their courage and
met at a Safeway parking lot in Riyadh 25 years ago this November 6.
They piled into 14 cars, formed a convoy, and drove sedately through the
busiest part of the city. On their second lap, members of the
Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice
reported them, and came with the police to arrest them.
All the women—drivers and passengers alike—were thrown in jail. In
mosques across the kingdom, imams denounced each woman, by name, as
immoral. Their passports were confiscated. Those with government jobs
were fired. Fortunately, Prince Salman, who became king in 2015,
intervened so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of religious extremists.
Eventually, their passports and jobs were reinstated.
“It was worth it,” Almana says. “We made a statement about the right to drive our own lives.”
Nevertheless, the driving ban still holds, along with a host of other
restrictions. Women cannot interact with men. They must obtain written
permission from their male guardians—and a chaperone must accompany
them—every time they want to go anywhere or do anything outside their
homes or workplaces.
The endless taboos range from financial (women can’t open bank
accounts without their husbands’ approval) to impractical (they can’t
try on clothes while shopping).
Almana says research indicates the exceptional mistreatment of Saudi
women stems from misinterpretation of Islam, cultural differences
between nomads and city dwellers, and US foreign policy decisions that
backfired. “They thought they were fighting communism and they ended up
with Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and Khomeini,” she says.
A devout Muslim, Almana began reading the Koran as a child, and she says it teaches that women and men are equal.
“At least two clergymen have come forward to say their research found
nothing in the Koran to require guardianship, yet hundreds of
regulations require a guardian’s permission,” she says. “We discovered
that most were created by civil servants, based on their personal or
tribal traditions or beliefs, without having any basis in Islam.”
Change is slow, but Almana sees signs of progress. More than 56
percent of Saudi college students are now women. Polls show a majority
of Saudi men favor letting women drive. In August, for the first time in
history, Saudi women began registering to vote.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that she directs the largest group of
hospitals in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, which borders the Persian
Gulf, the authorities arrest Almana at least once a year. “My poor
husband always has the burden of being told to try to control his wife,”
she says with a gentle laugh. “They don’t know that he married a woman
who cannot be controlled and cannot be owned.”
Suddenly tears well up in her warm brown eyes. None fall, but her voice becomes heavy with grief.
“Do you know,” she asks, “that in Saudi Arabia, a husband or a
guardian is not punished if he intentionally kills his wife or his
daughter? A father beat his five-year-old daughter to death because he
suspected her of sexual activity.
“He could kill her because he owned her. This is what we want to change.”

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About Me

I'm a freelance writer based in Maine. I lived in Saudi Arabia for many years. I studied Arabic in college eons ago and married my college sweetheart, a fellow Arabic student. My first novel, A CARAVAN OF BRIDES, is set in Saudi Arabia. I'm working on my second novel while writing feature stories about the Middle East. I am also the co-founder and Administrative Director of the Arabic Music Retreat.